When Mom and Pop Can’t Sell the Farm (or in This Case, the Theme Park)

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As a family-owned amusement park opens for the summer, its owners of 43 years ponder its future. Step inside Donley’s Wild West Town in Union, Ill. in 360-degree video.Published OnJune 15, 2017CreditImage by David Kasnic for The New York Times. Technology by Samsung.

By Liz Moyer

June 15, 2017

UNION, Ill. — It’s not easy selling a Wild West Town theme park located 60 miles northwest of Chicago, as Larry and Helene Donley have discovered.

The octogenarian couple have run the place for 43 years and are finally ready to retire. But their sons, Randy and Mike, who are in their early 60s and have helped manage it, are keen for other challenges. And the three Donley grandchildren, who grew up playing cowboy games at the 23-acre amusement park, are off living their own lives. It seems quite likely that this quintessential family-owned business will be passed into the hands of an outsider.

There is a hitch, however: The elder Donleys don’t want someone to change the property into, say, a concert space, as a potential buyer once suggested. Ideally, they want things to continue in their current Howdy Doody-esque form, right down to the gold-panning pavilion, the live action Wild West show, and kiddie rides on the 19th-century miniature locomotive.

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Second graders from Lakewood Elementary in Carpentersville, Ill., hurrying to catch the park’s train before it leaves the station.CreditDavid Kasnic for The New York Times

Donley’s Wild West Town has been for sale, off and on, for a few years. The current asking price is $7 million, but Larry Donley has turned away people who didn’t seem willing or likely to preserve it as is.

“I don’t believe anyone really interested in this place will tear it down,” he said in an interview on a recent Sunday.

Developers have salivated over the property, which comes with a restaurant that has a liquor license and would be perfect, in their minds, for other commercial uses, like a concert stadium or an antique car dealership. They look at Donley’s Wild West Town and envision how quickly it could be razed.

And while the senior Donleys know they could easily cash in by ceding to such tempting offers, they are resolute.

Randy and Mike Donley say the theme park taps into their father’s inner child, and he seems to agree. “It reminds me of when I was a kid in the 1930s,” Larry Donley said.

Such is the difficulty of selling a family heirloom business that no one else in the family really wants to run.

Does this frustrate the younger generations? They say no, and insist they are committed to operating the park until they find that elusive buyer. “The park was never our dream,” Randy, the younger son, said of himself and his brother, who auction antique phonographs, jukeboxes and other 20th-century Americana as their principal occupation. As for their father, however, “He really believes that that person is out there.”

As with many amusement parks, the bulk of the revenue — some of it from the $17-a-person admission — has to come in between May and the end of October. Mike Donley wouldn’t discuss financial details, but he said the park had earned the family enough to sustain three generations over the decades. Mike and Randy Donley both say it is profitable.

Jim Futrell, an amusement park historian, said a park the size of Wild West Town may bring in around $10 million annually, but that wouldn’t include the proceeds from a restaurant on the site run by twin brothers who only recently took it over and from other events held there, including auctions by Randy Donley.

Places like Wild West Town are relics of a bygone era, trying to attract children who are more attracted to virtual reality and mobile apps than games of cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians.

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The actor Bob Brown, left, playing the jail’s marshal. He gave students from Lakewood Elementary, at the park on a field trip, a tour of the jail.CreditDavid Kasnic for The New York Times

Similar family-owned theme parks dotted the country in the 1950s, profiting from increasingly prosperous Americans who took their vacations on the road after the opening of the Interstate System of highways. Roadside attractions had certain themes that would have been familiar to children of that era: Western-oriented spots like Frontier Town, which still lives on in Berlin, Md., or Christmas-themed sites like Santa’s Workshop, an amusement park in North Pole, N.Y. (also known as the town of Wilmington, which is about 140 miles north of Albany).

Mr. Futrell, a director of the National Amusement Park Historical Association, said that bigger, flashier and more modern theme parks have squeezed out the smaller and more antiquated ones. They have dwindled from a few hundred in number to a few dozen, and those that remain have repositioned themselves by adding thrill rides or other types of attractions.

As for the smaller theme parks that no longer exist, in many cases the families that owned them cashed in on their land holdings — at great profit — and closed up shop.

The concept of the family road trip has also evolved. “What you’re seeing are changing vacation habits,” Mr. Futrell said.

Robert Kramer, the marketing director at Santa’s Village in East Dundee, Ill., said that operating a small amusement park comes with some modern challenges. Both Wild West Town and Santa’s Village focus on the 2-year-old-to-tween crowd. These days, those children are reluctant to put down their electronic devices for a day of unplugged, old-fashioned fun, he said.

The increasingly far-flung nature of organized sports ties up family free time. And a glut of entertainment options, from bowling and paintball to bigger and more extravagant theme parks, also draws away potential customers.

Santa’s Village opened in 1959 but closed in 2006, and its original owner is dead. Under new ownership and management, the park reopened in 2011 and has continued to add attractions, including a $1.5 million roller coaster that opened this year. Constant investment is needed, Mr. Kramer said, because “there are a ton of other options when it comes to family activities.”

Parks tied to the Wild West or cowboys have struggled in particular, said Mr. Futrell, the historian, because that theme has lost its appeal with younger audiences. After all, “Bonanza” and “Gunsmoke” are no longer popular prime-time television fare.

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Wild West Town’s stunt show theater section of the park, where actors perform shows multiple times a day.CreditDavid Kasnic for The New York Times

A once family-owned Frontier Town in New York’s Hudson Valley shut down in the late 1990s, its buildings still vacant. Early this year, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York proposed a$32 million redevelopment of the 85-acre site, including a visitor information center, a campground, facilities for shows and festivals, and space for historic exhibits about Adirondack Park.

Ponderosa Ranch, a theme park that operated on Lake Tahoe, Nev., set of “Bonanza,” shut down over a decade ago.

Donley’s Wild West Town is still the site of many happy childhood memories — particularly for the Donley grandchildren.

“As a child growing up, it was like a fairy tale,” said Shawnah Donley, 29, the daughter of Randy Donley. “It was our backyard, and we were part of what our family did for a living.”

She grew up nearby and recalls school field trips to Wild West Town. After college, Ms. Donley got a job in the live action Wild West show, where her work caught the attention of a talent scout. That led to her professional career as a stunt actor, with credits that include the movie “Contagion” and the NBC television series “Chicago Fire.” She now lives in Chicago and also works as a real estate broker. But while she says her generation, which includes a younger brother and a cousin, hopes to see the park continue to operate, the fact that her family is looking to sell it isn’t a surprise.

“It’s always something that we thought would happen,” she said. “We have our own interests and futures.”

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The phonograph section in Wild West Town’s museum.CreditDavid Kasnic for The New York Times

The Donleys have always been collectors of trinkets and oddities. Larry Donley acquired the first seven acres of the property in 1972 so he could build a storehouse for the antique phonographs and other things he had begun collecting decades earlier. “I didn’t really know what stuff I had, and I still had too much,” he said. Back then, he owned a gas and service station in Berwyn, Ill., around 50 miles closer to Chicago, where he raised his family. But he would eventually sell that business.

Randy and Mike Donley grew up watching their father collect these pieces of Americana and got into the game themselves, snapping up antique guns and military memorabilia and assorted pieces of American history like toys, lamps, telephones, phonographs, music boxes, telegraph equipment and war souvenirs.

The first building on the park’s site became a museum and showcase for these items. Despite being right off Route 20 and barely three miles from the Illinois Railway Museum, visitor traffic was slow for the first couple of years.

It wasn’t meant to be a theme park at all until Larry Donley built the town’s gold mine and gold-panning attraction to occupy the children of adults who visited the museum, which opened in 1974. “It all kind of evolved,” Mike Donley recalled.

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The owner Larry Donley displaying a handful of gold pyrite in the park’s gold panning section.CreditDavid Kasnic for The New York Times

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Second graders panning for gold.CreditDavid Kasnic for The New York Times

In addition to the museum and gold mine, the site has an operating antique train, a gentle roller coaster (the “Runaway Mine Cart”), a carousel and a water ride. There are also firing and archery ranges, a tomahawk throw and slingshot gallery. Employees dressed as cowboys give roping lessons and gun-spinning exhibitions. The town jail includes authentic 19th-century cells acquired from the jail in the town of Union. Visitors can coax the town marshal to arrest people.

During the height of the season, the site employs about 100 people, many of them students at the local high schools. It draws visitors from a 60-mile radius in northern Illinois, attracting school and day care groups, church groups and camp attendees.

Sid Schroepfer, who will be a high school senior in the fall, demonstrated his lasso-twirling skills in the park one recent Sunday. This is a new job for him, and he said he liked it because he “gets to play cowboy all day.”

“We are selling an experience for parents and grandparents and children,” Mike Donley said. “Everything is hands-on.”

The park has given birth to some careers in show business. In addition to Shawnah Donley, there is Joey Dillon, a gun spinner who now coaches actors on gun handling for films and television. He credits his two seasons in the cast at Donley’s for starting his career.

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Actors and workers at Wild West Town relaxing after the students have gone for the day.CreditDavid Kasnic for The New York Times

He grew up in rural California and developed an interest in gun spinning from watching old Westerns, and when he moved to Chicago to pursue a career in comedy, he fell into a job at Donley’s. “I look back on Donley’s as kind of my fun dorm days with a bunch of college-aged kids, hanging out with them at night and playing pranks backstage,” Mr. Dillon said. He is still in touch with some of his former colleagues, some 20 years later. Mr. Dillon wasn’t aware the property was up for sale.

Taylor Fryza, who directs and acts in the park’s live shows, remembered visiting the town as a girl. “When you’re a little kid, it’s like stepping into a different world,” she said. Eventually she went to acting school in New York and returned home. She said she was not worried about the place being for sale. “You just put your best foot forward and do as many shows as you can,” she said.

When it comes to the sale effort, the Donleys have displayed a little showmanship of their own. In what the family admits was largely a publicity stunt, they put the Wild West Town up for sale in last year’s Christmas catalog of Hammacher Schlemmer, where it stood out among the massage wands, radio-controlled toys and exercise gadgets. Many years earlier — in 2003 — they listed it on eBay for $12 million, though they didn’t get many serious offers then, either.

And so the operation chugs along, in nostalgia mode for some of its owners. “As much as we enjoyed it, as much as we loved it, it was hard work seven days a week,” Mike Donley said, adding that the grandchildren “didn’t see that as a future for them.”

Larry and Helene Donley live in a house right next to the amusement park and work on the site every day. The family jokes they are likely to ask the next owners for a job. The brothers say they aren’t forcing a sale.

“If they want to find another proprietor during their lifetimes, I’d rather let them do that,” Mike Donley said of his parents. “It’s another challenge for them.”

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A billboard at the intersection of Route 20 and South Union Road advertising the park.CreditDavid Kasnic for The New York Times

Correction:

An article last Sunday about an effort to sell a family business, Wild West Town theme park, misidentified the state where a shuttered theme park, Ponderosa Ranch, is located. It is on Lake Tahoe in Nevada, not California.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: This Family Business Needs a New Family. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe